_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI A data table thousands of years old (2020)
smpx7 wrote 3 hours 45 min ago:
Excel -2k
psd1 wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
Oh god. Debugging macros was horrible before VB.Cuneiform. You had to
sprinkle your code with because there was no support for
rezmason wrote 4 hours 13 min ago:
For years I've wondered what the first, earliest color lookup table
was.
Like any mapping from an index to a color value. Like a design for a
Roman mosaic that indexes tesserae, or a declaration of which parts of
a statue or mural would receive which color paint. Or even the
inventory of someone who traded in pigments.
notorandit wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
What it's not obvious it the amount of technical and cultural
advancements Sumerians did.
We don't know enough about them as their history has been mostly lost
and only crumbles and leftovers can be recovered from the dust of the
millennia.
Besides a bunch of words still in use, in some form, in modern
languages, the writing itself seems not to be the greatest invention,
while bringing humanity from prehistory silence to history chatter.
I wouldn't be surprised if we found evidence of more technical and
social advancements we have given for granted in the past thousand
years.
closed wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
It's neat to see tablets discussed in the context of modern tools. I
recently helped edit an article for Great Tables[1] that discusses the
history of tables like this, and recently Hannes mentioned a
protocuniform tablet in his duckdb keynote at posit::conf()[2].
There's something really inspiring from realizing how far back tables
go.
[1]
URI [1]: https://posit-dev.github.io/great-tables/blog/design-philosoph...
URI [2]: https://youtu.be/GELhdezYmP0?si=bSISmFjeRpKxfLWq
kijin wrote 5 hours 15 min ago:
"Table" and "tablet" literally have the same root. It's flat surface,
a two-dimensional blank space that is perfect for laying out data,
dinner, or anything else you'd like to display.
OrvalWintermute wrote 7 hours 33 min ago:
Notice how it includes the Igigi (lesser gods of their pantheon) and
mention great weapons of An[u], Enlil & Enki, the Ruling gods of their
pantheon, associated with city destruction
numpy-thagoras wrote 9 hours 44 min ago:
Sumerian Spreadsheets. This means only one thing: the History channel
will find a way to attribute the creation of spreadsheets to aliens.
Cthulhu_ wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
Or maybe it was a time traveling accountant? Either way, the truth is
out there...
29athrowaway wrote 10 hours 33 min ago:
If you like history and you like tables, these are some of the most
historically relevant tables:
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonsine_tables
ecocentrik wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
Not quite as ancient but still very cool. "Nicolaus Copernicus bought
a copy while at the University of Cracow, and cared about it enough
to have it professionally bound with pieces of wood and leather.[9]
Alexander Bogdanov maintained that these tables formed the basis for
Copernicus's development of a heliocentric understanding in
astronomy."
Cthulhu_ wrote 1 hour 55 min ago:
That's a neat example of how "boring" statistical data / record
keeping can lead to great scientific results.
BeefWellington wrote 10 hours 56 min ago:
Thanks for sharing this. Pretty awesome to see how old aspects of
technology are, especially as relates to clear and concise
communication.
eieio wrote 11 hours 55 min ago:
Is there a good word for "obvious" that doesn't have negative
connotations?
When I see something like this it makes me think about how a
spreadsheet structure is "obvious" - but I mean it positively! It's a
beautiful, intuitive, almost inevitable way to lay out data, and I'm
delighted that folks came up with something like this so long ago.
I feel this way about a lot of my favorite posts on HN, whether they're
a bit of history, a totally new invention, or something different
entirely. And I certainly feel it here.
dr_dshiv wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
âNaturalâ
jiggawatts wrote 2 hours 5 min ago:
And yet when I got bored during the COVID lockdown and decided to
analyse the published data sets against infection spreading models
such as SIR, to my horror I discovered that every published data set
had something Stupid about it with a capital S. Most commonly it was
transposed data, published with each day's data in columns instead of
rows.
I remember one official announcement from a state government health
department that was investing significant money into developing a
"scalable solution" because... they hit the 16K Excel maximum column
count. Of course, they could have simply put their data into rows and
"scaled" their existing solution to 1M data points, but they'd much
rather pay Deloitte, Accenture, or whomever a couple of million
dollars for a real enterprise system instead.
Next time I come across idiocy like this, I'm going refer back to
this article and point to the four thousand year old tablet and say:
"Those people got it! They understood how to do this! Why haven't you
caught up to technology that was around before widespread adoption of
the wheel!?"
DamonHD wrote 2 hours 40 min ago:
My uncle, who was a top UK lawyer but not really into tech, basically
reinvented a spreadsheet on paper spread over his office floor, while
working on a hige planning case. Yes, I think that basic structure
will pop out of a number of problem types, eg Gaussian elimination.
MomsAVoxell wrote 3 hours 38 min ago:
I had the thought that the columns served different levels of
literacy - that there is a hierarchy of competence in the columns
themselves, or at least that each column could be assigned to a
different person for action.
For example, the purpose of the columns containing sums could be the
assignment to an individual (or eventual role) which is responsible
exclusively for the paying-out of the sums indicated - whereas the
prior columns were to be used by roles responsible for setting the
amounts to be paid, and a role perhaps for assaying the land/works.
Each column could be for an individual role, and thus the table
indicates not only figures and amounts, but also organizational
structure.
If one flows from left to right, one can see different identities
involved in filling in the cells, eventually terminating in the
actual recipients of the funds being distributed.
fifilura wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
Having worked a lot with columnar data, I often have to tell the
object oriented crowd that "It's the rows and columns, stupid!".
(And that last sentence was a paraphrase. They are far from stupid,
just differently wired).
I think managers should be emboldened to do that too. They often work
out their solutions in Excel. And then the developers turn those fine
rows and columns into an object oriented soup.
mrkeen wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
The problem is my rows typically don't have the same columns.
A 'userCreated' row has 10 columns (for now), but a 'userDeleted'
row overlaps on only two of those (let's say 'Datetime' and
'userId').
And userBanned brings in a new column 'reason' which isn't in the
schema, so I have to store it in some catch-all json 'data' column
which kills my db's size & performance.
I persevere with the format, but always wish we were using the
right tool for the job (nosql).
6510 wrote 4 min ago:
As I started out in a time when you had to coin your own format
for everything I passionately hate it when the data has to
facilitate to the tool. I'm no db wizard so I feel terrible using
the json cell unsure about the level of sin involved. I also
adopted comma separated fields. Don't tell anyone
CalRobert wrote 3 hours 34 min ago:
It is indeed! But it fails when you need more dimensionality.
begueradj wrote 5 hours 12 min ago:
It's obvious nowadays in the era of a sofa and Netflix, not 4000
years ago where 9 out of 10 new born kids die and those who survived
generally didn't make it until 25 years old, and where the primary
issue of people was what to eat the following day and in case no
tribe attacks them in the middle of the night if they would survive
to the bite of that scorpion.
yard2010 wrote 31 min ago:
You make the dystopian world we live in sounds like a disney
utopia. Which is very nice.
noselasd wrote 1 hour 5 min ago:
When you're cities of 20-40k people 4000 years ago, there's quite a
bit of admin work that has to be done - it's not all small farmer
villages or hunter-gatherers. Ancient Sumeria was quite advanced.
Cthulhu_ wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
That's a lot of assumptions about life 4000 years ago when the
article provides evidence of someone doing admin work instead of
worrying about food, "tribe" attacks and scorpion bites.
defrost wrote 5 hours 2 min ago:
Almost half of all births ended in death before the age of 5,
greatly lowering the average.
When infant mortality is removed, evidence seem to show averages
of life expectancy for 3000 years ago to be around 52, give or take
15 years.
URI [1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2625386/
jasdi wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
An artist once told me some people enjoy Making Contact with Beauty.
In the Simplest of things. And that can become a goal or a guiding
philosophy.
It's like when you look at a facial expression in a frame of Calvin &
Hobbes or Tintin or Miyazaki it is extremely SIMPLE.
The fewest of dots, dashes and squiggles basically. Change them even
a little and you get total shit.
It captures Reality in such a fantastic way, exciting the exact same
neurons in your head that something real does, that people have to
come up with words for it like - Beauty.
Hackbraten wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
There's a German word "naheliegend" (pronounced nuh-her-lee-guend),
whose literal translation would be "lying nearby".
I think we typically use it as a mixture of "sensible", "seemingly
natural" and "obvious" without that confrontational subtone.
philipswood wrote 4 hours 49 min ago:
In Afrikaans we have the (slightly old fashioned):
Voor die hand liggend.
Something like: It is right in front of your hands.
dyauspitr wrote 5 hours 45 min ago:
That word sounds like youâre saying ânear the groundâ.
kijin wrote 5 hours 24 min ago:
A similar English expression might be "low-hanging fruit", but
again for some reason we've attached negative connotations to it.
I don't know why English keeps doing that. It feels so cynical.
eieio wrote 7 hours 11 min ago:
I think plenty of other comments have made good suggestions but
that this clearly takes the cake for me!
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that German has a great word for
this, although I admit when I started reading your comment I
expected it to be a compound word.
I quite like the literal translation too!
codetrotter wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
We have the same compound word in Norwegian, with same kind of
meaning:
Nærliggende
> 2. som naturlig faller en i tanken ; som det er naturlig å
gripe til
(Aside from also having a literal meaning of being in physical
proximity.)
Translated:
âWhich naturally comes to mind; which it is natural to resort
to.â [1] This Norwegian word would not have naturally come to
mind for me though, if it wasnât for GP mentioning the German
equivalent of it. It is not a word I usually use myself. But I do
hear others use it now and then.
URI [1]: https://naob.no/ordbok/n%C3%A6rliggende
mncharity wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
Hmm, and 2D sort-into-piles is done even in kindergarten. Including
one axis being ordered. Especially 2x2 sorts.
Oddly, ordering both axes is very rare - size-vs-color yes, and
color-vs-numberOfHoles, but not size-vs-numberOfHoles. Which was a
puzzle when considering xkcd-ish discrete Ashby charts for K.
Sort-within-cell is also uncommon.
noduerme wrote 9 hours 15 min ago:
I think once someone wrote a list (a 1D array), it was pretty
inevitable it would turn into a 2D array within a week or a month.
But it took what, another 4000 years for people to start writing
arrays of 3 dimensions or more? And then within a couple centuries we
got tensors, and the arrays are too big to check.
thaumasiotes wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
> But it took what, another 4000 years for people to start writing
arrays of 3 dimensions or more?
Paper is two-dimensional.
d0mine wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
book is 3D
HappMacDonald wrote 2 hours 56 min ago:
Trilogy is 4Dnine nineDnine depending where you pick it up
geor9e wrote 9 hours 25 min ago:
emergent? natural? a 2D surface has two orthogonal directions, so if
you're using lines, so your choices are either grid, slanted grid, or
godawful mess
moffers wrote 9 hours 36 min ago:
You said it already! âIntuitiveâ.
zipping1549 wrote 2 hours 27 min ago:
You can both be unintuitive at first and be obvious at the same
time. Double entry accounting, for example.
hammock wrote 11 hours 34 min ago:
Column headers as well, as per modern convention, as opposed to row
headers.
6510 wrote 28 min ago:
the last col is the header. I see the use of row-span too!
Something we are still struggling to figure out.
notorandit wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
Usually we put "properties" as column headers while rows represent
entities whose those properties are assigned or recorded.
It would be interesting to understand why it's not been the other
way around or whether Sumerians used both orientations.
HappMacDonald wrote 2 hours 53 min ago:
I'd imagine it's down to our convention of writing left to right,
so more-related data points (such as properties of the same item)
get arranged left to right.
A quick test to that hypothesis (which I'm too lazy to try to
perform but offer to anyone who might be interested in looking or
who might already know) would be looking at ancient Chinese table
layouts. :)
highwind wrote 11 hours 44 min ago:
How about self-evident?
hammock wrote 11 hours 32 min ago:
Innate, instinctive, intuitive, natural, automatic. I donât think
obvious is a bad word though.
Descartes did not invent x-y coordinates until the 1600s, yet a
table of columns and rows is totally natural and emergent given a
two-dimensional recordkeeping medium
HappMacDonald wrote 2 hours 52 min ago:
I'm never not going to be gobsmacked that Euclid didn't ever try
using a coordinate grid as a tool. 8I
jbkcc wrote 12 hours 30 min ago:
This is amazing. Iâve been collecting images of tables in an are.na
album for a while, trying to get a handle on all the ways they show up
in visual culture. This one is by far the oldest Iâve ever seen! If
youâre interested in this you might enjoy the album, too. Itâs
URI [1]: https://www.are.na/joshua-kopin/tabular-presentation
Micoloth wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
Ha. What an amazing collection!
It hits so many right sposts. Thanks for sharing it
niobe wrote 12 hours 31 min ago:
Excel is in our DNA and will never die
jon_richards wrote 10 hours 59 min ago:
Unfortunately our DNA is also in excel. Several genes had to be
renamed because they kept being identified as dates.
smcin wrote 2 hours 27 min ago:
Excellent
TZubiri wrote 12 hours 28 min ago:
Funnily enough our DNA does not use a fixed-length offset mechanism.
It uses null termination sequences (and start sequences too, for some
reason.)
Which is closer to the storage mechanism of excel (XML), and not to
it's visualization interface (tables).
klabb3 wrote 10 hours 28 min ago:
Interesting. Well yeah null termination seems better if (a) you
donât have an integer encoding and (b) you have random âbitâ
flips.
TZubiri wrote 8 hours 58 min ago:
I don't think you need integer encoding to process fixed lengths.
They do it just fine at the word level for codons. You would need
a specific mechanic processors for each different schema length
pattern though.
I think bit flips have no effect on the appropriateness of either
fixed length or null termed. But omissions and comissions are
probably why anything fixed length doesn't work.
TZubiri wrote 12 hours 33 min ago:
The advantages of tables, are that you can visually or geometrically
read the contents easily, whether it is reading a row and only a row,
or wether it's reading the contents of a column sequentally.
While we had spreadsheets since the 90s, which visually allow the user
to create tables. Relational database take this concept to the very
architecture in both the storage format and as in the data retrieval
mechanisms.
Relational databases define schemas with fixed length fields, and by
extension each row has a fixed length. This is equivalent to the
horizontal length of a column, but in terms of bytes. This allows for
quickly finding the nth row of a table, or the ith field of a column.
Query languages formalize the algorithm for reading a traditional
table. Going row by row checking the description of each transaction
(Select * from table), comparing it to our searched term (where
description = salary), then going to the column with the destination
account, and looking for that in another table with a similar process.
Just that, interesting how the same metaphor lead to 2 very different
types of accounting software.
gerdesj wrote 11 hours 47 min ago:
"interesting how the same metaphor lead to 2 very different types of
accounting software."
The tablets are tabulated lists which is how anyone might do a
shopping list or list of income and expenditure.
Double entry book keeping is only around 600 years old (I'd have to
look it up). That method requires an in from somewhere corresponding
to an out from somewhere else. It enables or enhances all sorts of
funny business and also cross checking and auditing.
Then we move on to the full Nominal/Sales/Purchase ledgers with
Cashbook and all the rest. Perhaps we might instead go for the
personal version.
Anyway, my point is that accounting does not depend on IT related
metaphors.
The tablets in OP are tabulated tallies of works and how they were
generated - it is like a spreadsheet where the human is the computer.
Funnily enough, we call them tablets instinctively. Computer
originally meant a person who computed things. No need for metaphors
at all 8)
notorandit wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
DEBK is also tabular. And it's a perfect solution when you cannot
(or don't want) delete or update older data. Just like when you
write on clay tablets.
I wouldn't be surprised if we recover Sumerians example of DEBK
tablets.
TZubiri wrote 9 hours 11 min ago:
Not sure how double entry book keeping relates here. Not relevant
to tablets, to excel, nor rel dbs.
Is the argument here that single entry bookkeeping is not real
accounting?
zitterbewegung wrote 11 hours 56 min ago:
LANPAR, available in 1969, was the first electronic spreadsheet but
was on mainframes
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet?wprov=sfti1#
gerdesj wrote 12 hours 6 min ago:
"Relational databases define schemas with fixed length fields"
What is a varchar or a blob? Even a .csv allows for a variable
length field (by default). I think you missed out the word: "can".
Fixed field width is an optimisation strategy not a requirement.
TZubiri wrote 9 hours 5 min ago:
Not strong on db internals, but those are 100% the exception, late
additions, and not recommended for performance.
The table is stored as a fixed length structure and var length
fields are pointers to some other place.
In the same manner that a traditional table might point to some
other book for more details.
Csv is also exclusively variable length, and it's nevet fixed
length.
Another example of fixed length structures are arrays. I'm not
postulating a novel breakthrough.
panstromek wrote 4 hours 9 min ago:
Sqlite stores everything as variable length I believe. They have
their own varint type for storing integers.
gerdesj wrote 12 hours 11 min ago:
"While we had spreadsheets since the 90s"
I was using SuperCalc in the '80s.
TZubiri wrote 9 hours 3 min ago:
My bad. Also lotus 123.
thristian wrote 9 hours 46 min ago:
VisiCalc, the first computerised spreadsheet, was released in 1979.
Presumably there were non-computerised spreadsheets, actual large
sheets of paper, used for calculations before that.
TZubiri wrote 9 hours 3 min ago:
The tab character, along with record separators were present in
the OG ascii block too, so they were probably always there.
mcphage wrote 12 hours 55 min ago:
> I'm pretty confident, though, that in another thousand years there
will still be ancient data tables "archived" underground in Iraq, while
todays' billions of spreadsheets in digital form and on non-archival
paper will have long since disappeared.
Probably, but you never know. The Mesopotamians didnât intend their
tablets to last this long, eitherâbut they often got burned in fires,
which hardened them so they lasted. So some of our artifacts might get
accidentally preserved as well.
runevault wrote 7 hours 41 min ago:
What are the odds any electronic data store, tape or SSD or anything
in between, could last that long?
I guess some random store keeps getting moved from one storage device
to another by accident, but beyond that I'm not sure if it is
reasonably possible.
panstromek wrote 4 hours 6 min ago:
Microsoft is has been developing one for quite some time. Glass
structure that should last thousands of years.
mncharity wrote 9 hours 7 min ago:
> some of our artifacts might get accidentally preserved as well
IIRC (not likely these decades later), when recovering old MIT AI Lab
backups (9-track tape goes slowly by a read head, yielding bits,
plastic backing, and a pile of magnetic dust), one lisp machine
backup contained a core dump file, which included the screen buffer.
A single moment of someone's long-ago day, with assorted windows,
including the cause of the dump. And a bit of graphics fun - a
critter crawling across the screen - frozen in time.
TZubiri wrote 12 hours 29 min ago:
The older the stuff you read is, the stronger the selection bias.
There must be a huge amount of civilizations that were writing on
paper or papyrus around that era, but they just didn't survive.
The success of purposeful creation of monuments is usually attributed
to their size, like pyramids. Turns out making it big is a pretty
good strategy if you want something to last and (not loose it).
I'm sure in mileniums we will have both purposefully long lasting
small and big monuments, as well as unintentional long lasting
records.
Cthulhu_ wrote 1 hour 48 min ago:
This is what I don't really understand about modern-day rich /
famous people; they'll build big houses and yachts, and some
governments even build government seats and palaces which might be
preserved for the ages. But it doesn't feel like they're building
"monuments" per se.
Then again, survivorship / selection bias like you said; we don't
yet know what the Wonders of the World built today will be in
2000-4000 years, because we don't know what will remain or what
will be considered significant. I mean there's huge skyscrapers,
ostentatious buildings built in the richer cities. There's a giant
clock in Mecca, the Venetian and Grand Lisboa in Maccau, the New
Century Global Complex in China, etc.
But few or none built to just exist, like the pyramids that were
sealed off.
After solving world hunger etc, if I were stupidly rich, I'd have a
monument built. Sealed off containing the world's knowledge in
redundant and multiple mediums. And with a visitor center / museum
because people will be curious, of course.
micromodel wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
> There must be a huge amount of civilizations that were writing on
paper or papyrus around that era, but they just didn't survive.
I don't think this part is true. Papyrus wasn't cheap.
ggm wrote 12 hours 44 min ago:
"Memoirs found in a bathtub" by Stanislaw Lem. Printouts preserved in
mud deep in a fictitious pentagon basement for thousands of years
after nuclear holocaust wipes computer memories.
mcphage wrote 9 hours 18 min ago:
That book is wonderfully unsettling. The ending was perfect.
ggm wrote 6 hours 48 min ago:
The star diaries are my favourite, more whimsical. I'm very fond
of his robot stories. I've never re-read the Memoirs, they were
.. very unsettling. As was the futurological congress. Solaris is
too overlayed by the Tarkovsky film for me now, i used to make
shredded paper to hang in my office airvents as a homage.
psd1 wrote 2 hours 27 min ago:
Peace On Earth is my favourite Lem by a long way. The English
translation has aged better than Memoirs, too.
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